The Cold Cold Ground

McCrabban was a big, lanky man with a carefully engineered old-school peeler tache, straight ginger hair and pale, bluish skin. With a tan he’d look somewhat like a Duracell battery, but he wasn’t the type to get a tan. He was from farmer stock and he had a down-to-earth conservative millenarian quality that I liked a lot. His Ballymena accent conjured (in my mind at least) Weber’s stolid Protestant work ethic.

“A big Jock was giving me a hard time about my Beemer. It’s a ‘77 E21. That’s not flashy, is it? You need a reliable car as a cop, don’t you?” I said.

“Don’t ask me. I have a tractor and an old Land Rover Defender.”

“Forget it,” I said and showed him the case notes and Matty’s photographs of the victim.

“Recognize our poor unfortunate?” I asked.

Crabbie shook his head. “You’re thinking informer, I suppose,” he said.

“Why, what are you thinking?”

“Oh, I’m with you, with his right hand cut off? Standard operating procedure.”

“Do me a favour, take some of the headshots down to Jimmy Prentice and see if he recognizes our boy. I already asked the Chief so I’m a bit sceptical that Jimmy will have an ID but you never know.”

“He mustn’t be local. If Brennan doesn’t know him he isn’t worth knowing,” Crabbie said.

“If Jimmy draws a blank, fax them up to the Lisburn Road and ask them to cross-reference with all the informers on their books, especially ones that haven’t called in in the last day or two.”

Crabbie shook his head. “They’ll never tell us about the MI5 boys.”

“I appreciate that, Crabbie, but they’ll have the army list too, so let’s at least try and narrow the field down a wee bit,” I said with a slight edge in my voice.

Crabbie grabbed a couple of the face pics and took them downstairs to Jim Prentice who ran all the informers in Carrick. Because of the sensitive nature of his work he was stationed in a locked little office by himself next to the armoury. Prentice was the paymaster for all the touts, informers and grasses in our district so if the victim had ever taken a government shilling for information Jimmy would know it. If not, the fax to Belfast would set the ball rolling on their lists. Crabbie was right about MI5 though. MI5 had its own network of informers, some in deep cover, and because MI5 fundamentally didn’t trust anyone in Northern Ireland the names of their agents were never shared with us even when the eejits got themselves shot.

Matty appeared shortly before lunch and over coffee and sandwiches the three of us had our first case conference. Matty told us he had done the victim’s clothes but there were no liftable prints. He had fingerprinted the victim’s right hand and faxed the printout to Belfast, but so far nothing had showed up in the RUC database. Crabbie told us that no one had called in a missing person’s report in the last twenty-four hours and Jimmy Prentice had told him that our victim was not one of his lads.

“Did you find any bullets in your search of the scene?” I asked Matty.

Matty shook his head.

“Footprints, hair samples, anything unusual about the victim’s clothing?”

Matty shook his head. “The T-shirt was a black Marks and Spencer XL, the jeans were Wrangler, the shoes Adidas trainers.”

“Any claims of responsibility yet?” I asked Crabbie.

Crabbie shook his head. “No one’s said anything.”

“So we’ve got no prints, no physical evidence, no recovered slug, no claim of responsibility, no missing person’s filings, absolutely nowt,” I said.

The other two nodded their heads.

“Right fool I’ll look going to Brennan with this.”

“We could put his picture on TV,” Matty said. “Get an artist to fix up a sketch of his face pre-gunshot.”

“Brennan won’t like it, asking the public for help. Hates that,” Crabbie said.

“Does he now?” I muttered. He seemed like a man with a yen for the bright lights of a BBC studio, but that was maybe just me projecting, and again it made me think that Prods were different and Prods from East Antrim were even differenter.

“Aye, he does. He doesn’t want a lot of focus from the powers that be on our wee set-up down here,” Crabbie explained.

The three of us sat there for a minute looking at a filthy coal boat chugging down the lough. Matty lit a Rothmans. Crabbie began assembling his pipe. I played with a paper clip. I sighed and got to my feet. “Maybe the doc will help, who wants to come?”

“Will they be cutting him open?” Matty asked.

“I expect they will.”

Matty coughed. “You know what? I’ll stay here and chase up on our boy’s prints,” he said.

“I’ll pass too,” Crabbie muttered.

“You’re both a couple of yella bellies,” I said and put my coat on.

Crabbie cleared his throat. “If I could make an observation before you head off, Sean,” he said.

“Go on.”

“Very unusual this for these parts. No prints on anything? Believe me, I know these local hoods and no one in the Carrick UVF or the Carrick UDA is this careful. It gives ya pause for thought,” McCrabban said.

“Aye, it does,” Matty agreed.

“And no ‘thirty pieces of silver’ either,” I said. “They usually love that shit.”

Brennan saw me on the way out and dragged me to the Royal Oak public house next door.

He ordered two Guinnesses and two Bushmills.

“That’s some lunch. I’ll have the same,” I told him. He smiled and we took the drinks to the snug.

My pager was going like the clappers and under Brennan’s withering look I turned it off.

“What news, kemosabe?” he asked when we’d drunk our chasers.

“Drawing a blank so far, skipper, but I still have the patho to see and the victim’s prints are up in Belfast getting run through the database as we speak.”

“Thought I told you last night to handle this ourselves,” Brennan muttered with a scowl.

“Not the leg work too, surely? Besides, them boys in records have nothing better to do. If I sent Matty up there to do it manually it would take him two hours just to drive through the police road blocks.”

Brennan nodded. He fixed me with his Viking peepers. “And I heard you authorised ‘additional photography’?”

“Yes sir, but I’ll pay for that,” I replied.

“See that you do. I have to account for every penny.”

“There was some thought among the lads that we could go on the BBC and put our mystery man’s face on the telly, but Crabbie has crushed my show-business dreams by saying that’s not your policy? Sir?”

Brennan pointed heavenwards. “No. Let’s keep this nice and discreet. Once they start breathing down your neck …”

“Ok to authorise flyers and a poster of our poor unfortunate on the board outside the station?”

“One poster and don’t make it grim, let’s not upset the natives.”

Sergeants Burke and McCallister spotted us and joined us at the table, but I had things to do and couldn’t afford a lunch-time session with them boys. After I finished my Guinness, I went back in the cop shop and got my car. Carrick Hospital was a small Victorian building on the Barn Road, only about three hundred yards from the police station as the crow flew, but the crow could juke over a railway line, a stream and Carrick Rangers FC so it took me ten minutes to get there in the Beemer.

The waiting room was full of people with runny noses, colds and other complaints. A child was vomiting into a bag. A teenage hood stinking of petrol was holding a singed hand. A man with a face caked with dried blood was wearing a T-shirt that said “No Pope Here”. Considering his present condition, the Pope could consider himself lucky. There were, however, no young men lying on gurneys with their kneecaps shot off, which you always saw in the bigger Belfast hospitals.

I walked to the reception desk.

The nurse behind the counter was channelling Hattie Jacques from the Carry On films. She was fidgety, scary and enormous.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked in one of those oldtimey upper-crust English accents.

“I’d like to see Dr Cathcart,” I said with what I hoped was a winning smile.